First image from the James Webb Telescope released

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James Webb Space Telescope peers into lonely dwarf galaxy with sparkling results

At 3 million light-years from Earth, the isolated dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte has remained unchanged by interactions with other galaxies.

www.space.com

 

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James Webb Space Telescope view of Saturn's weirdest moon Titan thrills scientists

The James Webb Space Telescope observed two clouds in the atmosphere of Saturn's strange moon Titan.

www.space.com

James Webb Space Telescope view of Saturn's weirdest moon Titan thrills scientists​

It's been a cloudy season for Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Titan is a strange world — a little bit Earthlike, if land were made of water ice, rivers and seas were filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons, and the atmosphere were thick and hazy, dotted with methane clouds. And now, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) has observed two of those clouds during observations on Nov. 4 that have thrilled scientists, according to a NASA statement.

"Fantastic! Love seeing the cloud and the obvious albedo markings," Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a project lead for JWST's solar system work, wrote in an email shared in the statement, referring to glimpses of bright and dark regions of Titan's surface.

Two views of Saturn's moon Titan captured by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb Titan GTO Team/Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

Conor Nixon, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, arranged for JWST to spend a total of 15 hours of its first year studying Titan. In particular, Nixon's team wanted to study Titan's atmosphere, aiming to map the distribution of the haze and identify new gases, among other goals.


And the scientists were thrilled at the data JWST sent them. "At first glance, it is simply extraordinary," Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Université Paris Cité and colleague on the research, wrote in an email shared in the statement. "I think we're seeing a cloud!"

As they pored over the data, the researchers identified not one but two clouds, including, intriguingly, one located over Kraken Mare, the largest of Titan's seas. The scientists were soon inspired to find a way to check back in on those clouds to understand how they changed over time. The team reached out to the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i, which was able to snag observations of Titan just two days after JWST.

On the left, the James Webb Space Telescope Nov. 4, 2022, observations of Titan; on the right, Keck Observatory's view two days later. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb Titan GTO Team/Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

"We were concerned that the clouds would be gone when we looked at Titan two days later with Keck," Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who leads Keck's observations of Titan, said in the statement. "But to our delight there were clouds at the same positions, looking like they had changed in shape."

However, that alignment doesn't necessarily mean Keck saw the same clouds as JWST. Scientists expected high cloud activity because Titan's northern hemisphere is experiencing late summer and catching more solar radiation, so Keck's clouds may have been freshly formed.

And the scientists aren't done mining the observations. They identified the clouds in images taken by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a powerful camera that can image a target in several different wavelengths of light, which in the case of Titan allows scientists to separate out the lower atmosphere.

On the left, the James Webb Space Telescope Nov. 4, 2022, observations of Titan; in the middle, Keck Observatory's view two days later; on the right Keck's view Nov. 7, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/STScI/W. M. Keck Observatory/Judy Schmidt)

But the researchers haven't even finished evaluating all of NIRCam's data, and a second instrument was also at work. The observatory's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) gathered spectra. This technique splits light reflected off, for example, Titan's atmosphere and measures how much of each wavelength of light is present. The spectra should help scientists map what compounds are present in the lower atmosphere — including a strange bright spot over the moon's south pole.

JWST is also scheduled to return its sharp gaze to Titan in May or June 2023, according to the statement, this time using its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which will refine scientists' understanding of the chemicals in the moon's strange, hazy atmosphere.

Observations of Titan are particularly important now, in a lull between spacecraft visitors to the icy moon. NASA's Cassini mission arrived at Saturn in 2004 and flew past the moon more than a hundred times before the spacecraft's demise in 2017. And NASA is working on a new mission, called Dragonfly, which is dedicated to Titan and will see a drone flying through the hazy skies, allowing scientists to study the moon from some two dozen vantage points.

 

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NASA's Webb reaches new milestone in quest for distant galaxies

An international team of astronomers has used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies has taken more than 13.4 billion years to reach us, as these galaxies date back to less than 400 million...

phys.org

NASA's Webb reaches new milestone in quest for distant galaxies​

An international team of astronomers has used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies has taken more than 13.4 billion years to reach us, as these galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current age.

Earlier data from Webb had provided candidates for such infant galaxies. Now, these targets have been confirmed by obtaining spectroscopic observations, revealing characteristic and distinctive patterns in the fingerprints of light coming from these incredibly faint galaxies.

"It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early universe. It's very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies," said astronomer and co-author Emma Curtis-Lake from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. "Seeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission."

The observations resulted from a collaboration of scientists who led the development of two of the instruments on board Webb, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).

The investigation of the faintest and earliest galaxies was the leading motivation behind the concepts for these instruments. In 2015 the instrument teams joined together to propose the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an ambitious program that has been allocated just over one month of the telescope's time spread over two years, and is designed to provide a view of the early universe unprecedented in both depth and detail.

JADES is an international collaboration of more than eighty astronomers from ten countries. "These results are the culmination of why the NIRCam and NIRSpec teams joined together to execute this observing program," shared co-author Marcia Rieke, NIRCam principal investigator, of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The first round of JADES observations focused on the area in and around the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field. For over 20 years, this small patch of sky has been the target of nearly all large telescopes, building an exceptionally sensitive data set spanning the full electromagnetic spectrum. Now Webb is adding its unique view, providing the faintest and sharpest images yet obtained.

The JADES program began with NIRCam, using over 10 days of mission time to observe the field in nine different infrared colors, and producing exquisite images of the sky. The region is 15 times larger than the deepest infrared images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, yet is even deeper and sharper at these wavelengths. The image is only the size a human appears when viewed from a mile away. However, it teems with nearly 100,000 galaxies, each caught at some moment in their history, billions of years in the past.

This image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope highlights the region of study by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). This area is in and around the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field. Scientists used Webb’s NIRCam instrument to observe the field in nine different infrared wavelength ranges. From these images, the team searched for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose spectra abruptly cut off at a critical wavelength. They conducted additional observations (not shown here) with Webb’s NIRSpec instrument to measure each galaxy’s redshift and reveal the properties of the gas and stars in these galaxies. In this image blue represents light at 1.15 microns (115W), green is 2.0 microns (200W), and red is 4.44 microns (444W). Download the full JADES image from the Resource Gallery. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA/Webb).
"For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the big bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances," shared co-author Brant Robertson from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of the NIRCam science team. "To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience."

From these images, the galaxies in the early universe can be distinguished by a tell-tale aspect of their multi-wavelength colors. Light is stretched in wavelength as the universe expands, and the light from these youngest galaxies has been stretched by a factor of up to 14.

Astronomers search for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose light abruptly cuts off at a critical wavelength. The location of the cutoff within each galaxy's spectrum is shifted by the universe's expansion. The JADES team scoured the Webb images looking for these distinctive candidates.

They then used the NIRSpec instrument, for a single observation period spanning three days totaling 28 hours of data collection. The team collected the light from 250 faint galaxies, allowing astronomers to study the patterns imprinted on the spectrum by the atoms in each galaxy. This yielded a precise measurement of each galaxy's redshift and revealed the properties of the gas and stars in these galaxies.

"These are by far the faintest infrared spectra ever taken," said astronomer and co-author Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy. "They reveal what we hoped to see: a precise measurement of the cutoff wavelength of light due to the scattering of intergalactic hydrogen."

Four of the galaxies studied are particularly special, as they were revealed to be at an unprecedentedly early epoch. The results provided spectroscopic confirmation that these four galaxies lie at redshifts above 10, including two at redshift 13. This corresponds to a time when the universe was approximately 330 million years old, setting a new frontier in the search for far-flung galaxies. These galaxies are extremely faint because of their great distance from us. Astronomers can now explore their properties, thanks to Webb's exquisite sensitivity.

Astronomer and co-author Sandro Tacchella from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom explained, "It is hard to understand galaxies without understanding the initial periods of their development. Much as with humans, so much of what happens later depends on the impact of these early generations of stars. So many questions about galaxies have been waiting for the transformative opportunity of Webb, and we're thrilled to be able to play a part in revealing this story."

JADES will continue in 2023 with a detailed study of another field, this one centered on the iconic Hubble Deep Field, and then return to the Ultra Deep Field for another round of deep imaging and spectroscopy. Many more candidates in the field await spectroscopic investigation, with hundreds of hours of additional time already approved.

 

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James Webb detects the oldest supermassive black hole ever observed

The newly-discovered supermassive black hole existed only 570 million years after the Big Bang, making it the oldest ever observed.

interestingengineering.com

 

[KAL-EL]

All very fascinating stuff indeed..

I just wonder what images the JWST has captured that are being withheld from the General Public.